A man page generator is one of those tools that I’ve said I would write for a long time, being displeased with most of the other options. For a while I used asciidoc, but was never fond of it. There are a few things I want to see in a man page generator:A syntax which is easy to read and writeSmall ...

During the KDE sprint in Berlin, Roman Gilg leaned over to me and asked if I knew how to redirect the stderr of an already-running process to a file. I Googled it and found underwhelming answers using strace and trying to decipher the output by reading the write syscalls. Instead, I thought a gdb ba...

During the KDE sprint in Berlin, Roman Gilg leaned over to me and asked if I knew how to redirect the stderr of an already-running process to a file. I Googled it and found underwhelming answers using strace and trying to decipher the output by reading the write syscalls. Instead, I thought a gdb ba...

Microsoft infamously coined the euphemism “embrace, extend, extinguish” to describe their strategy for disrupting markets dominated by open standards. These days, Microsoft seems to have turned the other leaf, contributing to a huge amount of open source and supporting open standards, and is becomin...

Microsoft infamously coined the euphemism “embrace, extend, extinguish” to describe their strategy for disrupting markets dominated by open standards. These days, Microsoft seems to have turned the other leaf, contributing to a huge amount of open source and supporting open standards, and is becomin...

I’m writing to you from an airplane on my way back to Philadelphia, after spending a week in Berlin working with the KDE team. It was great to meet those folks and work with them for a while. It’ll take me some time to get the taste of C++ out of my mouth, though! In all seriousness, it was a very p...

I’m writing to you from an airplane on my way back to Philadelphia, after spending a week in Berlin working with the KDE team. It was great to meet those folks and work with them for a while. It’ll take me some time to get the taste of C++ out of my mouth, though! In all seriousness, it was a very p...

I can hardly believe it, but the media is finally putting Facebook’s feet to the fire! No longer is it just the weird paranoid kids shouting at everyone to stop giving all of their information to these companies. We need to take this bull by the horns and drive it in a productive direction, and for ...

I can hardly believe it, but the media is finally putting Facebook’s feet to the fire! No longer is it just the weird paranoid kids shouting at everyone to stop giving all of their information to these companies. We need to take this bull by the horns and drive it in a productive direction, and for ...

We live in a golden age of open source, and it can sometimes be easy to forget the privileges that this affords us. I’m writing this article with vim, in a terminal emulator called urxvt, listening to music with mpv, in a Sway desktop session, on the Linux kernel. Supporting this are libraries like ...

We live in a golden age of open source, and it can sometimes be easy to forget the privileges that this affords us. I’m writing this article with vim, in a terminal emulator called urxvt, listening to music with mpv, in a Sway desktop session, on the Linux kernel. Supporting this are libraries like ...

My disdain for Slack and many other Silicon Valley chat clients is well known, as is my undying love for IRC. With Slack making the news lately after their recent decision to disable the IRC and XMPP gateways in a classic Embrace Extend Extinguish move, they’ve been on my mind and I feel like writin...

My disdain for Slack and many other Silicon Valley chat clients is well known, as is my undying love for IRC. With Slack making the news lately after their recent decision to disable the IRC and XMPP gateways in a classic Embrace Extend Extinguish move, they’ve been on my mind and I feel like writin...

This is the third in a series of articles on the subject of writing a Wayland compositor from scratch using wlroots. Check out the first article if you haven’t already. We left off with a Wayland server which accepts client connections and exposes a handful of globals, but does not do anything parti...

This is an article I didn’t think I’d be writing any time soon. I’ve aspired to work full-time on my free and open source software projects for a long time now, but I have never expected that it could work. However, as of this week, I finally have enough recurring donation revenue to break even on F...

This is an article I didn’t think I’d be writing any time soon. I’ve aspired to work full-time on my free and open source software projects for a long time now, but I have never expected that it could work. However, as of this week, I finally have enough recurring donation revenue to break even on F...

This is the second in a series of articles on the subject of writing a Wayland compositor from scratch using wlroots. Check out the first article if you haven’t already. Last time, we ended up with an application which fired up a wlroots backend, enumerated output devices, and drew some pretty color...

This is the second in a series of articles on the subject of writing a Wayland compositor from scratch using wlroots. Check out the first article if you haven’t already. Last time, we ended up with an application which fired up a wlroots backend, enumerated output devices, and drew some pretty color...

This is the first in a series of many articles I’m writing on the subject of building a functional Wayland compositor from scratch. As you may know, I am the lead maintainer of sway, a reasonably popular Wayland compositor. Along with many other talented developers, we’ve been working on wlroots ove...

This is the first in a series of many articles I’m writing on the subject of building a functional Wayland compositor from scratch. As you may know, I am the lead maintainer of sway, a reasonably popular Wayland compositor. Along with many other talented developers, we’ve been working on wlroots ove...

August 14th, 2019 PYONGYANG IN CHAOS AS PANDEMIC DECIMATES LEADERSHIP. Sources within the country have reported that a fast-acting and deadly infectious disease has suddenly infected the population of Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea, where most of the country’s political elite live. Uncon...

August 14th, 2019 PYONGYANG IN CHAOS AS PANDEMIC DECIMATES LEADERSHIP. Sources within the country have reported that a fast-acting and deadly infectious disease has suddenly infected the population of Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea, where most of the country’s political elite live. Uncon...

What the heck is the POSIX shell anyway? Well, the POSIX (the Portable Operating System Interface) shell is the standard Unix shell - standard meaning it was formally defined and shipped in a published standard. This makes shell scripts written for it portable, something no other shell can lay claim...

What the heck is the POSIX shell anyway? Well, the POSIX (the Portable Operating System Interface) shell is the standard Unix shell - standard meaning it was formally defined and shipped in a published standard. This makes shell scripts written for it portable, something no other shell can lay claim...

You may have recently seen an article from GNOME on the subject of client side decorations (CSD) titled Introducing the CSD Initiative. It states some invalid assumptions which I want to clarify, and I want to tell you Sway’s stance on the subject. I also speak for the rest of the projects involved ...

You may have recently seen an article from GNOME on the subject of client side decorations (CSD) titled Introducing the CSD Initiative. It states some invalid assumptions which I want to clarify, and I want to tell you Sway’s stance on the subject. I also speak for the rest of the projects involved ...

Understanding fees are a really confusing part of supporting creators of things you like. I provide a few ways for people to support my work, and my supporters can struggle to understand the differences between them. It comes down to fees, of which there are several kinds (note: I just made these te...

Tools like virtualenv, rbenv, and to a lesser extent npm and pip, are occasionally useful in development but encourage bad practices in production. Many people forget that their distro already has a package manager! And there’s more– you, the user, can write packages for it! Your distro’s package re...

Tools like virtualenv, rbenv, and to a lesser extent npm and pip, are occasionally useful in development but encourage bad practices in production. Many people forget that their distro already has a package manager! And there’s more– you, the user, can write packages for it!Your distro’s package rep...

This article has been on my to-write list for a while now. In my opinion, fork is one of the most questionable design choices of Unix. I don’t understand the circumstances that led to its creation, and I grieve over the legacy rationale that keeps it alive to this day. Let’s set the scene. It’s 1971...